WORSHIP OF IMAGES.
The most ancient anti-Catholic, I might with propriety say, Protestant sect, whose form of synagogue worship is congregational, and who are republican at heart, though too often submitting to a despotism, are the Jews.
Between these two, the Jew and the Catholic, there exists an unmitigated hostility. The Catholic reviles the Jew with a sin of which, most likely, his own ancestors were not guilty, and the Jew curses the Nazarene for the idolatry of his worshipers.
He will make no allowances for the nice distinction between adoration and worship, and insists that the making the likeness of any thing to be set up in a place of worship is idolatry, and that the image of the cross is as much an image as the image of Him who hung thereon.
And in all this the Jew is right, if we are to obey the commandment of God. Yet the Jew forgets that a thousand years of trial were requisite to cure his ancestors of their proneness to idols.
After their first mission, accomplished in the birth of Christ, God has preserved them a perpetual witness against paganism.
But so subtle is this sin, that we find ourselves setting up sensuous representations, while we point the finger of scorn at the Catholic, who ascribes miraculous power to an image of the Virgin.
And what is the difference, the Almighty himself being judge, between setting up a cross in a place of worship or ascribing miraculous power to an image, or, as is the fashion to say, some spirit acting through the image?
Are they not different stages of the same disease, and each equally calculated to provoke the Almighty to jealousy.